Home Improvement School

Lawn care, at first glance, seems pretty straightforward. Mow, water, apply various bagged items, and take the time to frolic playfully on your fancypants expanse of greenery.

But after owning a lawn for any period of time, most of us start to ponder the deeper questions surrounding lawn. Questions like, dang, why does my water bill double every summer? and why does the pull-cord on my mower have to be such a pain? and, geez, where are all the birds and bugs around this joint?.

Issues like these are enough to harsh anyones lawn mellow.

The standard rallying cry in response to this is ditch your lawn!. While minimizing and replacing your standard American lawn with front yard food or native plants is an awesome goal, it can be an expensive and time-consuming task to tackle all in one go (though this month, my fellow Roundtable members have some options to inspire you to do just that).

Is there an alternative to the American lawn that doesnt involve outright removal? Id offer an emphatic yes.

Here are six ways to hack your lawn care routine and have an alternative lawn, without ripping it out:

What you should know: clovers slippery to run on, so its not good for  too many racings-about, and since clover is also great for attracting pollinators like honeybees and your local native bees, if anyone in your home has a bee allergy of some kind it might not be the best. But to me, it seems like one of the simplest ways to reduce your footprint and bring life to your lawn.

While organic fertilizers are the best choice for our gardens (theyre slow-release and nourish the worms and beneficial microbes in the soil), unfortunately the blood meal, bone meal, feather meal, and fish meal are made of exactly the ingredients they sound like. Theyre waste products from meat operations.

Even as a meat-eater, I try to buy from small, organic local farms that raise pastured animals, and Im not convinced there is a fertilizer option that supports that. So how can you give your lawn a boost without sacrificing your values? Try these animal-friendly options:

Alfalfa meal has nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, plus a natural growth stimulant called triacontanol that gives plants some superpower growing mojo.

Kelp meal is high in micronutrients and has both gibberellins and auxins, more of those natural growth hormones that plants make for themselves.

Compost is low in nutrients but encourages all the beneficial microbes and worms to do their thing and produce natural fertilizers. So its great for helping your lawn become more self-reliant.

And even if you opt for a normal organic fertilizer, find an OMRI-listed one, which has organic and non-GMO ingredients.

Keep in mind that if you have some lawn around it, youll want to leave easy mowing access on all sides. But this is one of the easiest ways to make your lawn a place you visit and use and not just a dead zone of green monoculture.

(Read The Edible Front Yard for tips on making this pretty rather than farm-like. The photo shown is from her book, illustrating a hellstrip planting with an industrial-cool corrugated metal raised bed.)

Then those old-style push mowers came into fashion. Which is cool, except theyre heavy and dont work that well. I have a friend who bought a push mower, lasted about three rounds with it, and hired a lawn service. And she works out!

Thats why my latest love is the Fiskars Momentum Mower kind of a new-skool take on the push mower that solves the issues the old ones had. Its been one of the top-selling mowers on Amazon for some time, and has gotten incredible reviews. I tested it out on a few stunt lawns, and in my opinion its far and away the best option out there.

Have you ever noticed that when you dont water the lawn, the only thing that stays green are the weeds? Well, why not take advantage of the fact that some other types of plants can co-mingle with your lawn and stay green with less juice?

As a bonus, a lot of these lawn companions attract the happy bees and pollinators that make your garden fun to be in.

Just plant up a cool little pot of grass and set it within your landscaping. Anyone wondering why you dont have a lawn can be deftly reassured that indeed, lawn is a vital part of your design scheme (and hey, a small patch like that is a lot easier to maintain!).

(Thanks to Donna for letting me show off her bit of lawn!)